How much to charge for an article

Pricing is the first business skill a writer needs, and the one nobody teaches. There is no universal rate — but there is a method for finding yours, and numbers from the current market to sanity-check it against.

The three ways to price. Per word is the industry shorthand and the easiest to quote. Per hour suits messy, open-ended work where scope is genuinely unpredictable. A flat fee for the whole piece — research, drafts and revisions included — is usually the most profitable, because it lets your speed and skill be the profit margin instead of a pay cut.

The market bands, roughly. Beginners commonly start around $0.05–$0.15 per word; intermediate writers land in the $0.10–$0.30 band; experienced specialists command $0.25–$0.60 and beyond, with technical, finance and medical writing at the top of the range. Hourly, solid commercial work tends to run $30–$60 early on and $50–$100+ with a track record. Treat these as orientation, not permission — niche and negotiating position move every number.

Know your floor before you look at anyone's rates. Your floor is the least you can accept per hour without losing money: your target income, plus business expenses, plus tax, divided by the hours you can realistically bill. A writer targeting $24,000 a year with $1,200 of expenses, a 25% tax set-aside and about 20 billable hours a week needs roughly $35 an hour — anything below that is a subsidy you are paying to the client.

The per-word trap. Per-word pricing quietly punishes you for getting faster and better. At 500 words an hour, $0.10 a word is $50 an hour; at the same speed, $0.25 a word is $125. The same article, the same effort — a fivefold difference in what your hour is worth. This is why experienced writers convert every per-word offer into an effective hourly number before accepting.

The flat-fee advantage. Quote the piece, not the word count. A flat fee rewards research efficiency, discourages padded word counts, and gives the client certainty. Scope it in one line: topic, length, one revision round, delivery date. Anything outside that line is a new quote.

Say the number. Pricing fails most often at the moment of speech. Practice one sentence until it is boring: "For a piece like that, my fee is X." No apology, no discount before they ask, no range unless they ask for one.

When to raise. After every few completed projects, nudge the number for new clients — existing ones move to the new rate on renewal, not mid-project. The writers who earn well are rarely the best writers; they are the ones who raised rates before fear finished its sentence.

The rate calculator does this arithmetic for you: start from the take-home you need and it returns the hourly, per-word and per-piece rates that actually get you there, tax and unpaid hours included.